Energy Outlook Q4 2010

Here we go again – $100 oil!

BY SEAN EVERS, MANAGING PARTNER, GULF INTELLIGENCE

December-01-2010

Will it be another roller coaster ride or have we moved to a new era of tripledigit prices, allowing countries and companies to plan accordingly?

It doesn’t seem so long ago that a million dollars was the WOW number. They even made TV shows about it – Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Now the pop song topping the charts goes, “I want be a billionaire so frickin bad!”The old saying of once in a hundred years appears under threat as editors scramble for new metaphors to describe once in a thousand year events: unprecedented popular uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa, never before recorded 9-scale earthquakes in Japan and biblical floods in Australia catch everyone off guard. The world seems to have changed a lot over the last year. As Nassim Taleb might say, we have certainly had our fair share of Black Swans. Random, unpredictable events that can have a huge impact on our lives have helped Will it be another roller coaster ride or have we moved to a new era of tripledigit prices, allowing countries and companies to plan accordingly?Crude break the vice grip of $60-$80. The Dow Jones and FTSE 100 stock market indices are screaming it’s back to the races – don’t miss the train andjump on board! And yet, I find we are still caught in a supply-demand imbalance limbo land of far too many questions and very few answers.If most of the graphs are pointing to the sky, why are interest rates still near zero? And why is the Federal Reserve quantitatively easing, i.e. printing as much cash as possible? And how should one interpret a falling Shanghai stock market over the past six months?In the meantime, in my home town in Ireland, a million dollars has reclaimed its WOW mantle!